You have to feel for the Reverend Geoff Stickland. He's the vicar who has repeatedly removed the artificial flowers from the grave of a child. They were being laid there by the child's parents, who are now so upset that they're reportedly considering exhuming the body of their young daughter. Stickland was obeying the parish rules. Real flowers only in graveyards. It's not just a question of taste and curbing the modern trend to adorn graves with all kinds of personal mementos.

Graveyards are public places and so, harsh as it may seem, there are factors to consider other than the feelings of grieving relatives. Perhaps Stickland should have been more considerate or tactful. That's impossible to tell from a distance. But, in fact, there's something more at stake in the story. It's the shared dimension to grieving, something that's often forgotten in an age that has come to see loss as a largely private affair.

There's been a big change in the practices of mourning over the last hundred years or so. Had you walked down a Victorian high street, where there are now bike shops or nail bars, you would have seen as many businesses trading in the paraphernalia of death – from black-bordered notepaper to dark and sombre clothing.

It seems morbid now, another example of the neurotic excesses of the Victorian age, to be forgotten like their supposed fear of sex. But there was a wisdom in their death rites that we've arguably lost, namely a recognition that mourning cannot be done well alone. It requires a public dimension because the sadness of a death is not just about who you've lost. It is about what you've lost of yourself in losing them too. As Lacan observed, when someone dies, you don't just lose them, but you lose yourself as you were with them.

If you were a husband and you lose your wife, you need to remake your place in the world as a single man. If you were a mother and you lose your child, you need to understand once more who you are apart from being a mother. It's about your relationship with the world, your role in the community. That's part of the pain. So it's helpful to have the community involved in your loss too, and not just personal family and private friends.

As Darian Leader explores in his book, The New Black, finding yourself again is a social act – which perhaps explains why many cultures have professional mourners. It's the very artificiality of the professional mourner that allows them to take on a mediating role. Like the vicar or registrar who declares that you are now married, they announce to everyone else that something foundational is taking place, and that everyone is involved to a degree.

Similarly, there's the ancient thought that nature mourns with you – the imperative that lies behind WH Auden's well-known lines in Funeral Blues:

"Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods."

The mourner's world has to be remade and that requires a remaking of the world too. Or it's striking that in Hamlet, the prince only begins to mourn his loss when he finds the skull of poor Yorik and then sees Laertes ostentatiously mourning too. Hamlet's loss is externalised. The death of his father stops being his private obsession.

It seems that many of the public aspects of mourning fell into disuse during the first world war. There were then just so many deaths that it ceased to be possible for them all to be performed appropriately in public. The war memorial was a substitute.

What we're left with now is a thin of awareness about the public dimension to mourning. That comes to a head in these rows about graveyards. Those who mourn today are bound to be upset when they cannot leave tokens other than those that are publicly sanctioned. But as you'll know if you've ever walked through a well-maintained Victorian graveyard, as the evening begins to fall, the experience is profoundly cathartic. Your loss is not your own. It's shared by all humanity.